5 Ways The Apocalypse Could REALLY Happen!!!

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s This Is the End. Edgar Wright’s The World’s End. Marc Forster’s World War Z. Paul Middleditch’s Rapture-Palooza. All of these films deal with, or at least thematically hint at, the apocalypse. Hell, Craig Robinson was even in two apocalypse comedies this summer that opened in the same month!

With that in mind we thought it would be fun to take a look at some real-life end of the world scenarios with artist Ron Miller’s (via The Smithsonian) visual representations of what they might look like.

Check ’em out below!

1: ASTEROID

You know the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs after hitting the Yucatan Peninsula millions of years ago? Well this is what that exact moment would look like if you were in Manhattan watching the thing hit New Jersey. You’d probably be dead a few seconds after making this your last sight, so take it in.

2: METEORS

Another Manhattan based tableau, taking a crater the size of the one created in Arizona only 30,000 years ago and applying it to another cityscape. In my very non-scientific opinion, if the Earth barreled into a large enough field of these, it could cause a significant amount of damage.

3: RISING SEA LEVEL

This one’s already happening (thanks captains of industry). Miller actually says this one might not be too far off, only decades away. London is a sea level city and the sea doesn’t need to rise that much more to make this happen.

4: BLACK HOLE

If you ever wanted to feel powerless (and you are powerless in the grand scheme of the universe), think about all of the ways the cosmos could unflinchingly and randomly kill you. Miller elaborates on how something could appear, “In this case, you have a stray black hole that wandered just a wee tad too close to Earth. I got the black hole pretty right. I have the polar jets, which its magnetic field causes. The energy pours into these things from incoming material and gets shot out [of] these plasma jets from the north and south poles. Earth has probably got about 15 minutes left, I think. Just like the Moon causes tides on Earth, the gravity of the black hole is so great that it is pulling much, much harder on one side of Earth than the other. That’s the strain that is ripping the planet apart. As the planet comes apart, all of the debris is spiraling into the debris disk circling the black hole. It goes down that drain into who knows where.”

5: GAMMA RAY BURST

Another one continuing the theme of random universal annihilation. Here, a Gamma Ray – these things happen but we have NO WAY of predicting them – almost literally microwaves the planet. Per our source, “At least one of the big extinction events, about 450 million years ago, might have been caused by one of these things.”